Advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking, telecommunication and other related technologies have led to wide spread adoption of wireless communication, e.g. mobile wireless “cell” phones. In the case of wireless communication, such as mobile wireless “cell” phones, typically, a mobile wireless “cell” phone (also referred to as a mobile handset), communicates with a “nearby” service station (also referred to as a base station), which relays the communication signals for the mobile handset. The service/base station provides the relay service for all mobile handset in its coverage area (its “cell”). Thus, a service/base station typically receives and processes communication signals from a number of mobile handsets in its “cell” concurrently.
Use of multiple antennas at the service/base station for receiving the communication signals from the mobile handsets have become popular, as it has several advantages in terms of enhancing the capacity and throughput of the wireless communication system. Various signal processing techniques are employed to process the received communication signals, including but not limited to “space-time” processing techniques.
Among the space-time processing techniques, beamforming is one of the promising areas of interest for enhancing the strength of signals received from a desired direction. One known technique is the employment of a known training sequence to estimate the optimum weights (e.g. using least mean square (LMS)), for beamforming to a desirable direction. Other known techniques for estimating the directions of arrival (DOAs) include employment of the Bartlett processor or the MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification) technique.
Training has the disadvantage of incurring overhead in the throughput of the system, and convergence may take longer time than the time available to make the determination. The latter techniques require a large number of snapshots of the received signals to provide a good estimate of a correlation matrix reflective of the correlation (or the lack thereof) of the received signals from the independent signal sources.
Additionally, while each communication signal typically has a number of multipaths, due to environmental factors, such as reflection off structures and so forth, these techniques typically estimate the DOA based only on the most dominant multipath of a signal.